Abdul-Qaadir first warned that the purpose of marriage was to produce Muslim children. It didn’t matter if my wife was Christian; there was only one faith that my kids could be raised in.
He warned also that my first obligation would not be to my wife, but to my brothers and sisters in Islam. “There is good in this world, and there is evil,” Abdul-Qaadir said. “And as long as your wife isn’t a Muslim, as far as we’re concerned, she is one hundred percent evil.”
That remark stuck with me when I went home that evening and saw Amy: she is one hundred percent evil. I tried not to act differently toward her; I tried to put Abdul-Qaadir’s remark out of my mind. But it wasn’t something I could shrug off easily. Nor was it something, I realized, that I could dismiss out of hand as wrong.
I was beginning to believe in new rules, restrictions, and moral injuctions that I never could have accepted as a campus activist. I thought about
sharia,
or Islamic law, almost every day. Wasn’t it really the best way to govern a society? Weren’t Allah’s decrees superior to the shifting sands of modern morality?
With that, I saw many of my old liberal assumptions come crashing down. Why shouldn’t the state ban homosexuality? Why shouldn’t the state prohibit blasphemous speech?
For the first time, I began to take these questions seriously.
One night, Pete asked me to come by his house. I hadn’t been paid in a couple of months. Pete had explained that he didn’t want to write me checks too frequently because it’d surely tip off the IRS that I was working for him. But now he wanted me to come by to discuss payment.
I parked by his house and walked around to the back, to the old prayer room. The sheets that hung from the ceiling were still up; Pete did not want his visitors to catch a glimpse of his wives. Pete went behind the sheets at one point and returned with a couple of plates of rice and a bottle of tahini. We sat on the floor together eating. I wasn’t going to speak first; the situation concerning my payments had been awkward from the very outset, when the first check I received had ostensibly been for selling Pete a computer.
Pete took a sip of spiced tea, then asked, “How much did we agree that I was going to pay you a month? Two thousand dollars?”
“Yeah.”
He looked at me sternly. “I don’t remember agreeing to that number.”
I was taken aback. When Pete convinced me to apply for a job, he had shown me the advertisement in
Al-Jumuah
magazine that listed the salary as $2,000 a month. Still, I didn’t want to come off as defensive. I just nodded and said, “We agreed to two thousand.”
Pete exhaled and looked at the floor. “Bro,” he said, his voice less lively than usual, “I don’t have the money to pay you. I can give you seven thousand dollars for the past few months’ work and for the rest of your time here, but that’s it.”
My mind suddenly flashed to the concept called
fi sabil Allah,
things that you do purely for the pleasure of Allah. Intentions are important to the reward you receive for good deeds, and anything
fi sabil Allah
is done with the best of intentions. What better reward is there than working to advance Islam while foregoing some of the payment that you’ve been promised?
“I’ll do it for seven thousand dollars, Pete,” I said. “I’m happy to do it
fi sabil Allah.
”
Pete nodded. We sat around chatting a bit longer before I walked to the car to head home. I didn’t mind taking less than Pete had initially advertised the position for. What did bother me, as I drove home, was that Pete had first tried to claim that he never agreed to the advertised salary.
A few days later on the phone with al-Husein, I found myself saying something the significance of which neither of us fully comprehended at the time. “What they don’t understand when they see how we practice Islam,” I said, “is that we don’t do these things because it’s what we
want.
We don’t suddenly wake up and decide that we hate music or silk. We do what we do because it’s what Allah wills.”
The Salafis were now a “we.”
eight
MAN BITES DOG
Some people think you should kill them.”
This was Abdul-Qaadir’s response when Pete’s eleven-year-old son Yusuf—whose mother had left Islam for Christianity—asked if it was possible for someone who had been Christian, then become Muslim and then returned to Christianity, to again become Muslim.
Yusuf’s mom had been a source of anguish for Yusuf and his brother Yunus. Both of them looked up to Pete with the full devotion of sons who are starved for their father’s attention. I never met her—she and Pete had long been divorced by the time I got to know him—but I once saw a photo of her and Pete when they were young. She was an attractive blond woman, and Pete looked different back then. Now, despite his mischievous streak, he was quite tense. He actually seemed relaxed back then. Back then he didn’t have a beard, but had big, hippie-type hair. I imagined that he had been like the person I was before I began to work for Al Haramain—liberal, devoted to pluralism, probably unduly optimistic.
Pete once told me that when he met the mother of Yunus and Yusuf, his main concern was bringing her to the faith. Before anything else, he preached to her about Islam, and eventually persuaded her to convert. Only then did they marry. (The clear implication was that I shouldn’t marry Amy unless I could persuade her to become Muslim.) Eventually, though, she divorced Pete and left Islam. I never heard the story behind this decision, but I now imagine that her experience was similar to mine. I imagine that Pete first told her about a simple, beautiful, and progressive Islam. He may even have believed it when he told her about it. But as Pete became a more serious Muslim, I imagine the rules and restrictions became greater. She may have been uncomfortable with the status of women in her new faith. Pete may have asked her to wear the
hijab.
Whatever the reasons, she returned to Christianity. I remember thinking at the time that she had left Islam because she wasn’t really ready to submit to Allah’s will. I remember thinking that she had made an enormous mistake.
Both of Pete’s sons identified themselves as Muslim. The older son, Yunus, was more rebellious, and more troubled, than Yusuf. He had an inquisitive and scientific mind. He’d constantly ask about and latch on to the fine points of Islamic law, even though he didn’t seem too devout. But he certainly enjoyed correcting others when their Islamic conduct didn’t comport with the rules. Yusuf, in contrast, was a sweet kid. He was obedient to Pete, well behaved. I remember watching him play with Dawood’s sons, who clearly looked up to him. At the time, I marveled at how mature Yusuf was for his age.
Yusuf did seem genuinely devoted to Islam, and he was obviously upset that their mom had left the faith. He wanted her to be Muslim like the rest of us. It was at a night lecture given by Abdul-Qaadir that Yusuf asked his question about those who have left Islam and received what must have been a very upsetting answer.
I hadn’t gone to that lecture, but the next morning, when Abdul-Qaadir sat down in the office for our morning Islamic chat, he began by saying, “Last night’s lecture caused a bit of controversy.”
“Oh, really?” I asked.
Abdul-Qaadir told me about Yusuf’s question, when he’d asked whether it was possible for someone who had been Christian, then become Muslim, and then returned to Christianity to again become Muslim.
In response, Abdul-Qaadir had said flatly, “Some people think you should kill them.”
Abdul-Qaadir said that some people were offended by his remarks. “It’s a sensitive issue for Yusuf and Yunus,” he said, “since their mother is an apostate.” He was putting this mildly. Imagine telling an eleven-year-old kid that God wants his mom put to death, and you’ll understand the level of sensitivity at play.
But that wasn’t what I thought of when Abdul-Qaadir told me about the previous night’s class. I wasn’t thinking about feelings or sensitivities. I wanted to know if those people really
should
be killed.
And Abdul-Qaadir had a ready explanation. “The reason a lot of people are uncomfortable with this is because they don’t understand the notion of apostasy in Islam. They have these Western ideas about religion as something you try on to see if it feels comfortable, something that you can take off just as easily as you put it on. They hear that you can be killed for leaving Islam, and their reaction is ‘Huh?’ What they’re not considering is that religion and politics aren’t
separable
in Islam the way they are in the West. When you take the
shahadah,
you aren’t just pledging your allegiance to Allah; you’re aligning yourself with the Muslim state. Leaving Islam isn’t just converting from one faith to another. It’s more properly understood as
treason.
”
Something had changed in me. It used to be that when I listened to Islamic edicts, the first thing I’d ask was:
Is this moral? Is this rule just?
I had stopped doing that. The question of morality now seemed beside the point. After all, where was I getting my standard for morality if it wasn’t from Allah? Now, when I heard a new
fatwa
or an unfamiliar point of Islamic law, my initial reaction was purely logical. I no longer asked if it was moral. Rather, I asked whether this was a proper interpretation of the Qur’an and the Sunna. After Abdul-Qaadir explained that apostasy should be thought of as treason, I just nodded and said, “That makes sense.”
I was beginning to more fully understand what made me refer to myself as a Salafi in my phone conversation with al-Husein. I didn’t want to straddle two worlds with my commitment to Allah battling my passion for “social justice.” I didn’t want to be racked by doubts and uncertainty. I didn’t want to be regarded as a heretic by my brothers and sisters in faith.
No. I wanted to live a life of conviction—like Abdul-Qaadir, like al-Husein. I wanted a clear guide for telling right from wrong. Was there a better guide than Allah’s own word—the Qur’an—and the example of his last prophet?
Still, while Abdul-Qaadir’s description of apostasy made sense, I wanted to know for myself: was he right about the evidence?
I read up on the matter, turning first to Muhammad bin Jamil Zino’s
Islamic Guidelines for Individual and Social Reform.
I had gone from feeling trepidation whenever I saw the book, as though it were a despised enemy, to considering it an authoritative source of answers.
Flipping through Zino’s book, I found that it spoke directly to the topic of apostasy. There was a
hadith,
collected by al-Bukhari, in which the Prophet said, “Whoever apostatizes from Islam should be killed.” This seemed to leave little room for doubt. At the time, I felt proud that I didn’t just react emotionally to Abdul-Qaadir’s comment about the killing of apostates, but that I had instead recognized the logic behind the view, did the research, and found that his statement was theologically supported.
The beautiful thing about our faith,” Pete had told me when I first met him, “is that it’s a complete way of life. The Prophet, peace be upon him, taught about everything, down to how you eat your food and how you wipe after you go to the bathroom. Islam leaves no room for question!”
I was finding this to be the case. Sometimes the rules were difficult to remember, but I followed them dutifully.
One day in the office, I was ordering a book over the Internet. When I pulled out my credit card to enter its numbers in the order form, Dennis Geren looked over and said,
“Haram!”
“What?”
“
Haram.
That credit card is
haram.
Islam prohibits the paying of interest, and you have to pay interest with credit card debt.”
I shrugged. “I always pay my bills on time. I never pay interest on this credit card.”
“A number of Islamic scholars have considered that argument, and they concluded that even signing an agreement saying that you’ll pay interest in the case of a late payment is
haram.
”
Naturally, I stopped carrying and using my credit card after that.
Just as I had feared, that summer was not a good time to have Amy in Oregon.
I had come to accept rules and restrictions that I once thought ridiculous. I remember how bizarre I found it when Sheikh Adly refused to be in the same room with Suzi Aufderheide, and only considered it acceptable when she agreed to have the door open with her young son just outside. But now I was beginning to reconsider my views on relations between the sexes. And sadly, my relationship with Amy was the epicenter of how these changes played out in my life.
I never saw women in the Musalla. If women were in the building, they would be downstairs. At one point, the downstairs area was undergoing extensive renovation and was basically uninhabitable, so they moved the women upstairs to the living room adjacent to the prayer room. To make it Islamically acceptable, curtains were draped over the entrances to the living room so the men wouldn’t lay eyes on the women (similar to the curtains in the back of Pete Seda’s home). But Sheikh Hassan was visiting from California that week, and protested. He said it was wrong to have the women upstairs, because one of the men might glimpse them through the curtain when he was in the foyer. Although the women grumbled a bit, they were shepherded downstairs, where they could neither hear the sermon nor pray in comfort.
By the time Amy arrived in Oregon, I wondered if it was proper to make physical contact with her, wondered whether it was okay to even be in the same room with her. As I worked through these questions, I became more distant. I didn’t think she could understand.
One day after work, Abdul-Qaadir gave a lecture about the importance of marriage. I felt that the sermon spoke directly to what I was going through—the sinfulness of modern dating, the superiority of Islamic courtship, the obligation to marry once you’ve decided that a woman is right for you.